Sniffing around the Hydrant

UCF has its own share of accountability issues with the Erik Plancher problem and now the NCAA sniffing around the mother hydrant of recruiting violations, but it’s hard to ignore the tribulations of JoePa at Penn State, venerable veteran of six decades in the noble service of athletic achievement for the Lions, unless you count getting distracted while your friends victimize disadvantaged children in some of the worst possible ways. All I can say is there are sick puppies out there in the Pennsylvania hills, and they don’t wear coveralls to work. It half reminds me of that old science fiction story about the kid they keep in the basement so their lives can be beautiful on the outside.

JoePa gets a million or so a year to choreograph this wonderful pageant that is athletics and send promising athletes on their way to equally lucrative careers in professional sports to the cheers of adoring throngs whose lives are made better by the joyful melee, while we sacrifice a few helpless misfit pre-adolescents for the personal amusement of his pedophile friends. Where’s the harm in that, JoePa? Isn’t that the question his morally bankrupt student posse asks when they tear up Happy Town in retaliation for facing reality? Where’s the harm in that? Is that what the employees of Enron said to Kenneth Lay? You didn’t really know what your people were doing, so it was okay? Look at all the good JoePa did for the school and those athletes and the psychic karma of the nation. Where’s the harm in that, and there’s nothing to do but state the obvious, what JoePa knows better than any of them, that you could not pack enough money on a team bus to fix what has been done and who did it. As more victims come forward, that is a condition with which the Pennsylvania school will be very familiar very soon. They need to be retaining the Catholic Church for consultation. Cheap shot.

In the end (so to speak), can I have sympathy for a sixty-year career going down in flames over what is a pretty nominal violation of basic human rights compared to Somalia and Sudan? Sure I can. Where does responsibility end? Does it end with JoePa? Does it end with an administration that failed or preferred not to investigate? Does it end with a board of governors that chose idiots for administrators, a state legislature that funds perverts, an electorate that empowered the legislature that mandated the institution that funded the program that JoePa built? Does it even end with a nation that pledges allegiance to a Constitution that authorizes state legislatures in the first place? Maybe we could argue the limits of knowledge and some kind of responsibility to know, but isn’t that really what Kenneth Lay and JoePa and you and me are all about?

Not so deep down, we are all JoePa. We all have kids in the basement, and we are all going to pay for it. Sure, I can sympathize, and that’s the part of the JoePa justice that really stinks. JoePa will never get out of it. It’s offensive on an intuitive moral level. It’s going to cost a fortune, and no matter how much we try to blame it on somebody, there’s no way out for any of us.

Here's Thinking for You,

Iffy